Streaming and podcast solutions provider StreamGuys has announced SGcontrol, a powerful new managed service that makes it easier for media enterprises to control how audiences access their content. Providing flexible, centralized management of stream access mechanisms including geo-targeting, geo-restriction, and tokenized authorization in a single, unified service, SGcontrol enables broadcasters and content providers to improve their market-based monetization initiatives and ensure compliance with rights restrictions.

StreamGuys will showcase SGcontrol alongside other innovations at the upcoming 2022 NAB Show (April 24-27 in Las Vegas), where they will co-exhibit with technology partner ENCO. The event will also be covered by Radioinfo Asia.

“In today’s complex media distribution and licensing landscape, enterprise customers increasingly need more than just a single access control mechanism,” said Robert Minnix, product manager, StreamGuys. “SGcontrol lets them flexibly combine multiple control models to ensure their business requirements are fully met and that the right audience members get the right content. Plus, as a managed service backed by StreamGuys’ renowned operational support, SGcontrol frees customers from the time-consuming effort, implementation complexity, and steep learning curve they would face if managing these access control capabilities themselves.”

SGcontrol’s geography-based features can improve accuracy beyond IP address lookups with player-provided latitude and longitude. They flexibly support decision models including country, state, city, DMA, zip code, or radius distance from specified coordinates. The latter is ideal for distance-based content licensing arrangements commonly seen with sports that may not align with traditional broadcast boundaries. SGcontrol’s geo-targeting uses audience location to deliver appropriate regionalized stream variants or in- and out-of-market advertising, while geo-restriction blocks audience members outside the defined region from accessing the content for licensing compliance or audience pruning.

Leveraging the latest advances in StreamGuys’ SGpasskey technology, SGcontrol’s tokenization controls lock content behind incredibly flexible protections baked into a simple token delivered alongside the stream. Tokenization is the industry-standard way that pay-per-view and subscription-based streaming is offered to consumers, requiring content to first be authenticated before it is allowed to be delivered to the consumer. Ideal for premium content enablement and secure third-party distribution, SGcontrol supports token validation rules including long- or short-term timed expiry, username lists, valid referrers, and IP lockdown.

“Due to licensing, we only stream our stations in specific countries. StreamGuys’ geo-restriction capabilities keep us from getting into any legal issues with the royalty companies by preventing our streams from being accessed in unauthorized regions,” said John Whiteside, Technical Director at Houston-based RFC Media. “StreamGuys’ geo-restriction service has given us and our clients peace of mind that our streams will only be accessible in the countries where we have legal rights to allow access. And as a managed service, it is easy for us to set up geo-restriction for new stations and StreamGuys always implements our requests in a timely fashion.”